The Big Project

I've made reference to our basement renovation a few times.

It's been going on forever, but the more I read about other renovation projects, this isn't actually that bad.  However, we're nowhere near done.

I thought I took a bunch of before pictures, but apparently the basement was so ugly I never took the camera down there.  I do want to document the process a little bit though.

After months of cleaning the garage, and getting rid of things from every room upstairs and down, we finally took some steps towards getting rid of our semi-finished basement.

This is the moldy bathroom that we lived with for years.  The raised floor was mostly rotten away and there were areas I couldn't step for fear of breaking through.  We kept it because the alternative was to live with one bathroom.

We had actually started tearing it apart years ago by ripping down the ceiling panels and a huge unusable jacuzzi tub.  The plan at the time was to create storage where the tub was and fix the bathroom in the same basic layout without the mold.

Then the upstairs bathroom had an emergency and our money had to go towards fixing that one first.  The basement stayed moldy and now half torn apart for about 3 years.

It started to become a storage space.  Mostly for junk and excess building supplies and tools from the upstairs bathroom.

And this was the girls' bedroom.  I loved it when we first painted it.  And it did work for a few years, but they started to want their own rooms.  And the windows weren't to legal code, being too small to crawl through.

This is what it looked like when we last decorated it.


It was a pretty big space and the girls crammed a lot of furniture and stuff in there.  And it looks cozy in that picture, but it never looked that tidy ever again. 

After a bit of demolition, it looked like this.

And a bit more demo...

Under the yellow-painted paneling was another layer of paneling with cute horsies on it.  It looks like this room may have been original to the house.  We took the opportunity to write on the walls.  Just because we could.

And those weird block of colour on the walls?  They had glued blocks to the foundation in order to attach thin strapping to the walling so that the paneling could be nailed to something.  Glue.  Hmm.  And notice the total lack of insulation.  I think we can do better than that.   

More on The Big Project later.  It's an ongoing thing, but it's most definitely progressing to an exciting stage.